Algeria Probes Possible Role of Local Workers in Attacks

Low-level workers at the Algerian gas plant attacked by terrorists may have helped the militants by providing basic information. WSJ's Paul Sonne has spoken to survivors about the part local drivers may have played after being on strike for nearly six months. Photo: Getty Images

By

Paul Sonne and

Benoît Faucon

Updated Jan. 28, 2013 8:00 a.m. ET

Algerian authorities are investigating whether any local employees from the In Amenas gas plant aided terrorists who attacked the remote Saharan facility this month, amid survivors' accounts that the gunmen arrived with basic knowledge of the plant.

New information from people who survived the attack indicates that the militants lacked high-level technical knowledge that would have enabled them to do more damage quickly. For instance, employees recalled how militants pressured captives to explain how to restart the flow of gas.

"We understood they wanted to blow up the plant. So we told them the engineers had already left," a technician from Algeria's state-owned Sonatrach who was at the facility recalled.

ENLARGE

JGC President Koichi Kawana, right, at Narita Airport Saturday offered flowers at the casket of former JGC vice president Tadanori Aratani, killed in Algeria.
Kyodo/Reuters

But the more basic nature of the militant group's knowledge has focused Algeria's hunt for possible accomplices largely on unskilled employees from the country's poorer south, where the gas plant is located, said a top Algerian intelligence official.

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The broad slice of the workforce under scrutiny includes, but isn't limited to, roughly 100 local drivers employed at the gas plant—nearly all of them indigenous Tuareg from the Sahara—who immobilized the facility last year by holding a six-month strike that ended a few weeks before the attack, according to the intelligence official and a person with knowledge of the probe. None of the drivers could be identified or reached for comment.

Authorities are also looking at lower-level workers who wouldn't have been involved in the strike.

The deadly four-day siege, which began Jan. 16, took place just as life at the complex began returning to normal following a series of strikes that prompted the facility to freeze much of its activity in 2012.

After months of having few expatriate workers around, the facility had an unusual number of high-level executives on site from out of town. The plant had drawn down the level of expatriates in 2012 out of concern that there wouldn't be sufficient drivers for trips to and from the airport, which took more than an hour and were seen as dangerous enough that each bus was accompanied by an armed escort involving at least six vehicles filled with Algerian soldiers.

Fears that the terrorists utilized insiders and took steps to blow up the plant will likely force oil companies to reassess their security measures, particularly when it comes to vetting contractors.

Algeria and Western oil firms are beefing up protection of the country's energy industry—including the dispatch of more Algerian military forces—after the attack raised questions about the adequacy of security measures at such energy facilities.

One employee who saw the attack said the militants expressed a particular interest in American, British and French hostages, believing they would be the best leverage to secure demands that included an end to the French intervention in Mali and the release of prisoners in the U.S.

U.S. intelligence agencies are working with Europeans on sharing information as they try to identify and locate those responsible for the attack, people familiar with the hunt said Friday.

No Algerian officials have suggested a link between the strike and the attack, nor have they singled out the drivers. The local workforce as a whole has attracted the attention of authorities ever since Prime Minister
Abdelmalek Sellal
said last Monday that the 32 militants had obtained information about the plant's workings and arrived with a former driver from the facility.

"The terrorists knew what they were doing," Mr. Sellal said.

At least 37 expatriates, 29 militants and one Algerian security guard died at the plant, which is a joint venture among
BP
PLC,
Statoil ASA
and Sonatrach. Roughly half of the killed expatriates were Japanese, Malaysians or Filipinos, most of them working on a project by Japan's
JGC
Corp.
to build gas-compression plants at the facility.

Mr. Sellal said the militants' goal was to take expatriate hostages, transport them to northern Mali and use them as bargaining chips against French forces that have intervened to help Mali's government quell an insurgency in the country's north. When that failed, Mr. Sellal said, the militants turned their efforts to blowing up the plant.

Survivors point to signs the militant group had information about the facility before arrival.

The militants seemed to know the location of the residence camp's management office and the 5 a.m. arrival time of its top managers, said two employees. Others recalled how the militants quickly killed the electricity, seemingly within minutes of the start of the attack.

The gunmen arrived just as the bus that transports the compound's expatriates to the airport was leaving, which survivors said indicates prior knowledge of the transport schedule.

Although the terrorists could have gathered the information from the airport, the amount of information on the plant available to the attackers suggests they had inside information, the survivors said.

The militants also struck when a number of high-level executives were on site, a relative rarity. Top executives there at the time included Statoil's country manager in Algeria; a senior London-based executive from BP; the top adviser and former vice president of JGC; and all three senior on-site managers for BP, Statoil and Sonatrach. A number of those executives died.

But the militants lacked crucial technical details and showed major gaps in their knowledge, suggesting any information they had wasn't from someone highly placed. For example, they skipped over the location of the most-explosive chemicals in the compound, one employee said. They also tried to find workers capable of reversing the plant's emergency shutdown and restarting the flow of gas, but showed little understanding of how the energy facility functioned, three plant employees who survived the attack said.

At first, the militants asked questions about the airport and how to transport a group of expatriate hostages there to escape to Mali, one employee recalled. But when Algerian military negotiators refused demands, the terrorists turned their attention to the gas plant, survivors said.

"In their minds, they would take the expats and leave. When this plan was not working, they panicked. They started to be very angry," one of the plant employees who interacted with the militants recalled.

The inability to restart the plant flummoxed the militants' ringleader,
Mohamed Lamine Bencheneb,
who died in the attack, survivors said.

Mr. Bencheneb had a history with the Movement of the Sons of the Sahara for Islamic Justice, a group led by Saharan natives who rebelled against the involvement of the Algerian government and the West in their resource-rich region, advocating for an uprising and an Islamic state.

Mr. Bencheneb, who went by the alias "Tahir" during the siege, introduced himself to one plant employee as a leader of the Masked Brigade—tied to the so-called Signatories in Blood—and mentioned his association with
Mokhtar Belmokhtar,
the one-eyed Algerian smuggler and former top commander of al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.

In a video message released to the Sahara Media website, Mr. Belmokhtar took responsibility for the attack on behalf the Signatories in Blood, which experts said he founded late last year after falling out with the AQIM leadership. In the video message, he says his brigade is an al Qaeda affiliate but doesn't mention AQIM.

A bearded, blond militant who spoke unaccented English assisted Mr. Bencheneb during the attack, three plant employees said. At one point, Mr. Bencheneb boasted about the man's Canadian origin to a group of Algerian workers, one of the employees recalled.

"Look at this man and how Islam has reached Canada. But you in Algeria are not supporting us," Mr. Bencheneb told them, according to the employee, who said he saw the man on the phone with negotiators. The militants came from Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Mauritania, Mali, Niger and Canada, Algerian authorities said.

Canada's foreign-affairs ministry has said Canadian officials are on the ground in Algeria looking into the alleged involvement by a Canadian citizen in the attack.

The attack came on the heels of industrial unrest at the Algerian gas facility, where hundreds of Algerian workers went on strike June 21. The protests abated fully only in December. The plant reduced the number of expatriates to a bare minimum on more than one occasion.

"The number of expats at In Amenas was reduced by the [joint venture] during the strike last year," a BP spokesman said. "This was because of the reduced availability of transport for staff, and because equipment and materials could not be moved, so work could not get done, hence fewer people required."

Though the plant continued pumping gas from existing wells, the strike halted drilling of new wells and froze the site's fracking program, said the three employees. The facility would have drilled about four new wells in those six months had it been fully operational, meaning the strike cost the venture well over $100 million, one of the people said. BP and Statoil declined to comment on the strike's impact on drilling.

The strike consisted of two factions: skilled technical and administration workers, mainly from Algeria's north, and unskilled drivers, primarily local Tuareg workers. None of the workers are formally unionized, though Algerian law provides a right to industrial action.

Both groups worked on short-term renewable contracts for the Algerian staffing firm SARL BAAT but wanted permanent contracts with Sonatrach. In recent months, Sonatrach had been hiring technical and administration workers on direct contracts but stopped hiring drivers years ago, a technical staffer said.

As the strike progressed, the tenor of the two groups diverged, said people with knowledge of the action. Some drivers decided to go on a hunger strike in the brutal heat and began coupling their contract demands with arguments about the abuse of the local population by Western interests and Algerians from the north, said people familiar with the events. The drivers also protested for an extra two months after the technical and administration workers returned.

The strike underscored the tense relationship between the plant and locals, many of whom are poor and feel they don't benefit from the natural wealth of their region. Part of that equation is the Tuareg, the historically nomadic inhabitants of the Sahara whose population stretches across the borders of Algeria, Libya, Mali and Niger.

A manager for BAAT declined to comment on the strike, calling it a matter for Sonatrach. Spokespeople for Sonatrach didn't respond to requests for comment.

The technical and administration workers ended their strike last fall after receiving a pay increase and extra benefits but no direct contract with Sonatrach. The drivers stopped two months later. Negotiations with the workers stemming from the strike continued into the evening before the Jan. 16 attack.

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